In the News

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the award today of $238 million in “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act” funding for the establishment of eight Microelectronics Commons (Commons) regional innovation hubs. This includes the Commercial Leap Ahead for Wide Bandgap Semiconductors (CLAWS) Hub, led by NC State University with a $39.4-million award for FY23.

Christina Koch, who grew up in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and graduated from N.C. State University, will be part of the first crew of astronauts to travel around the moon in more than 50 years, NASA announced Monday.

At the FREEDM Systems Research Center, some of the state’s brightest minds are leading the way to improve how we power our lives.

On Friday, President Joe Biden’s top adviser on science and technology visited North Carolina State University to see firsthand how students are creating cleaner and more efficient energy systems.

Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd, a unit of Chicago-based energy provider Exelon Corp), in partnership with North Carolina State University’s FREEDM Systems Center, has been awarded a $200,000 federal research and development grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE) to help fund a $5m research project focused on improving the efficiency of, and reducing the cost of, extreme fast charging (XFC) for electric vehicles (EVs).

The new law includes $13.2 billion for research and the training of people to work in the development, design and manufacturing of semiconductor wafers and the chips that are built on them. The R&D funding could be a boon to North Carolina’s research universities, especially N.C. State. John Muth, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, said other states dominate in the design and production of silicon-based chips, but N.C. State is at the forefront of developing a new generation of silicon carbide semiconductors that can endure higher temperatures and higher voltages, qualities that will be increasingly needed in electric automobiles, data processing centers and clean energy production. “In general, we need to do more manufacturing, do it cleaner and employ people with better paying jobs and the CHIPS Act helps out with that,” he said.

Governments, businesses and universities worldwide are spending heavily to prepare for quantum. And in the past few years, the three corners of North Carolina’s Research Triangle—Duke University, North Carolina State University, and UNC—have each made distinct contributions to this emerging field, turning the state into a legitimate quantum hot spot.

Students created a set of activities to walk high school students through the entire computer vision pipeline by Jeremy Park and Sanjana Banerjee, who are Graduate Research Assistants and Ph.D. candidates at North Carolina State University, specializing in AI/Machine Learning.

What Will New Tech Look Like, and how will it work? Prepare for a future where you and your doctor track your health markers 24/7, manage chronic conditions in real time, and predict incoming illness with incredible precision – all from tiny sensors you’ll wear on your skin and in your clothing.

The program is part of a new partnership called the “NC-Viral Vector Initiative in Research and Learning.” It includes collaboration with other Triangle universities and industries with an aim to roll out products better, at lower cost and faster.

Homomorphic encryption allows third parties and third-party technologies to conduct operations on encrypted data. Homomorphic encryption is appealing because it preserves data privacy but allows users to make use of the data. It is considered a next-generation data security technology, but researchers have identified a vulnerability that could allow threat actors to steal data even as it is being encrypted.

A group of academics from the North Carolina State University and Dokuz Eylul University have demonstrated “the first side-channel attack on homomorphic encryption” that could be exploited to leak data as the encryption process is underway.

The American research university is a unique institution that much of the world has long tried to emulate. Many times underappreciated in the U.S., research universities are one of the most important knowledge assets of cities and states for economic development purposes. These universities influence the economic prospects of their regions and the nation overall in multiple ways.

NC State ranks at #7 in Technology Transfer and Commercialization.